PROPHETIC DEAD CHILD:
"I saw an angel: He was sailing in the sun,
diving slowly as if in a sea of honey,
and he came down and whispered to me:
"Oh little lambs, silent screamers,
oh. my tender, impatient dead,
a tiny error was made in the inventory
and now it's final: one more child."
(a silence of disbelief)
"That's what he told me. 'Rest just a little more
Only one more child."

Hanoch Levin"The Child Dreams”, scene 8 (Requiem)

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.

Pablo Picasso

From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation. And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?

Edvard Munch

When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.

Pablo Picasso

I don’t know why, but since my early childhood I was obsessed with the idea of justice. When I learned what people of my country did to innocent people during the Nazi-regime, and how mass-murderers got away after the war and made big careers – everything stopped for me right there. I lost my trust in the world of grown-ups and their system of values.
In a child the full potential of humane values and virtues, of innocence, trust, love, compassion and creativity is intact.
Children are sacred. But they are vulnerable and defenceless and depending on our fairness. And it seems that adults tend to betray that trust. In the sixties, long before mass media ever mentioned child-abuse in Germany, in my research into that subject, I saw hundreds of police-photographs of dead children’s bodies, fragile, skinny, broken and sometimes deformed beyond recognition; tortured to death – often by their own relatives. These pictures travel now with me and I can’t get rid of them.
My work is about the struggle of human existence and children are the heroes of my visual narratives.

Gottfried Helnwein
Interview with Alvaro Fierro Nadales, Chile

Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?

Charles MoriceA critic on young Picasso

Helnwein is a great believer in the ability of art to pass emotional memory on, as a reminder of the past or mainly as a warning of what the future might hold, for humanity, as far as he is concerned, has not learnt its lesson. Is there atonement in his artistic endeavors? I prefer the Jewish concept of “tikkun”, purification of the soul. It has a deeper meaning than the physical healing of scars, for it elevates us to the highest sphere of the spirit. The wounded girls close their eyes, but they are not blind. Behind their closed lids their gaze is clear and penetrating.

Nava SemelAuthor, Playwright, Israel

I'll never forget the sensation I had at the unveiling
of Gottfried Helnwein's "Head of a Child" in the Russian
Museum. And not just because this enormous canvas (six metres in
height, four in breadth), well-known from reproductions,
seemed to operate in a whole new way in the real, quasi-monumental
space of the museum's exhibition-hall, - I realised that I was looking
at the inner content of this innovative picture from a whole new
point of view.

Alexander BorovskyCurator for Contemporary Art at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
at the Gottfried Helnwein retrospective 1997

I always feel so much more comfortable communicating with children
than with grown-ups. Everything is far more simple and makes so much
more sense – to me at least. In the world of a child anything
is possible, there are no limits for imagination, and magic and miracles
are a natural part of life.
Communicating with adults, on the other hand, sometimes seems to
be so limited and incredibly complicated. And usually boring.
Unfortunately it’s the grown-ups that rule the world and make
the laws and all kids have to go through their demolition-program
called education. Once they come out on the other side they are usually
broken, and their magic is gone.
And then they can be citizens, soldiers,
clerks, psychiatrists, politicians, bankers, undercover agents, prostitutes
or other interesting things like that.

Gottfried Helnwein in an interview with Yuichi Konno for Yaso, Japan

Genius is childhood
recovered at will.

Baudelaire

O innocence!
innocence, innocence, innoc..., plague!

Arthur Rimbaud

I needed to purge
myself of all the attention my parents had given me - I wasn't neglected
enough as a child.

Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet)

The Voice of
the child is in all my work. Critics used to say that I am the
child in my plays. I don't think one has to be so literal, but
for me it makes the work believable. I think it is necessary that
we se the child and his point of view at all times.

Robert Wilson
The
Biography, Prestel

An alternative title to
"Angels Sleeping" for this exhibition could be "All
Hail to the Wounded Child," as
many of the works center on irreparably wounded children (both externally
and internally) as the innocent victims of war. The children in Helnwein’s
works may also represent the lost or destroyed child in all of us,
not only as victims of war, but as victims of modern society, with
all its mindless violence and perverse attraction to aggressive mobs
and disturbances. If there were a soundtrack to this exhibition,
it would be a long, endless scream.

Helnwein is the
next generation’s
final ally, a skilled provocateur forcing us to confront the legacy
we have bequeathed upon our children. Helnwein is our chronicler,
our conscience, the antidote to our failing memories. He refuses
to let us forget.

ArtweekColin Berry, 2004

In
addition to sketches of ballet-dancing hares, booted cats, and
strangled and stuffed ducks, there are studies or imaginative drawings
of the heads of ill-treated children, whose mouths are grotesquely
disfigured by braces and pink coloured scars. The grimaces on these
mocking distorted faces signalize disobedience, opposition and
turmoil, as well as a kind of childlike autonomy in
the depraved world of adults. The grin found on the faces of ill-treated
children, a grotesque picture puzzle which includes both the martyrdom
and subversion of mankind is entirely Helnwein’s invention.
It is manifested in the metamorphic images of injured bodies. It
is an obsessive pattern which is repeated in Helnwein’s pictoral
representation of the world and in his staged artistic actions,
serving as a metaphor for the invulnerability and invincibility
deeply seated in man...

Adults bring
a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations
of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful.
In his show, "The Child," at the San Francisco Fine Arts
Museum, deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of
pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously
disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator
and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan
soldiers. But the most haunting images may be the ones of children
who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's
children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of
anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the
enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" see straight
through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes.

San Francisco ChronicleSteven Winn, 2004

I feel there is a strong bond between artists and children and all
other sacred fools.

Gottfried Helnweinin an interview with Yuichi Konno for Yaso, Japan

A story by Stephen King. An American schoolboy, twelve or thirteen
years old, fascinated in his small-town boredom by documents on the
German concentration camps - the way his classmates are by Superman
- the formula of his fascination: THEY JUST DID THOSE THINGS...
At his daily bus stop, he recognises a face he has seen in photographs,
under a black cap with skull insignia and above a black SS uniform.
They boy blackmails the unidentified murderer to tell HOW DID YOU
DO THOSE THINGS. The murderer tells to save his life. Curiosity becomes
the urge for real experience: the two of them found Murder Inc. and
rid the small town of dogs, tramps, and other "unworthy life".
... How does a friendly person like Helnwein stand making his - excellent
- painting into a mirror of the terrors of this century? Or is it
that he can't stand not doing it? Does his mirror just reflect the
attitude of the century? TERROR WITHOUT END IS BETTER THAN AN ENDING
IN TERROR. It comes from the over-evaluation of death, a consequence
of "statistics" making it taboo. Perseus guillotines the
Gorgon in the mirror -, and when the head falls, it is his own. How
many heads does a person/man have in our age of mirrors?

Heiner Müller

Scale
is an important part of his strategy because, he wants to engage
with the widest possible public. To this end, transgression is also
central.
An extremely impressive work "Selection", made in 1988,
consisted of a series of uniform, huge images of children's faces,
stretching from Cologne's Ludwig Museum to its cathedral. The subtitle,
(Ninth November Night), gave the clue to the event the work marked
- the start of the Holocaust on Reichskristallnacht, November 9,
1938.
In presenting people with a series of entirely neutral, if rather
beautiful, pictures of innocence and implicitly pointing out that
just such innocents were sorted and selected for extermination, Helnwein
was resurrecting an aspect of the past that most Germans and, perhaps
even more so, Austrians, have preferred to forget.
It certainly annoyed someone to the extent that they came and vandalised
it, symbolically cutting the throats of some of the images. Selection
shares with Helnwein's more sensational work a desire to prod us
into thought about our own attitudes and roles.
The real horror, as his work reiterates, is indifference and complacency.